Iron Sky – Movie Review

movie reviewThis one was on my radar for years. Even before the first trailer hit the internet. It was a very ambitious movie project, completely financed by independent production companies as well as a significant part of internet crowdfunding. It is a movie that follows the paths of a traditional b-movie. But is it a good or bad b-movie?

The story is pretty simple and if you’re reading this, I don’t think I have to explain a lot. It’s basically about Nazi’s who found a hideout on the dark side of the moon. There they managed to build a society and follow their traditions. One of the traditions is, of course, to take over the planet. Planet Earth of course. So there is a long time plan on the move, to take over good old mother Earth. In the movie the USA are closing in on an election. Madame president (who does look a little like Sarah Palin) sent a 2 man team to the moon to take some nice pictures that shall help her to win the election. One of the guys is a model. A good looking guy… a black guy. He discoveres the Nazi base and gets arrested by them. He’s one of the protagonists we follow. The more he sees what’s going on, he wants to cross the evil plans, the Nazis are ready to execute. That starts a string of happenings and hijinks.

Now the first thing you can do wrong is to go into the movie with A: expectations & B: being easily offended by jokes that are politically incorrect. Some of the jokes are quite forced. Others require you to have some education to understand them. So it’s a weird mix of poor and quality jokes in there. Also the dialogue feels a little clunky at times. On the other hand we have actually a nice cast, that tries to get the best off of the stuff they got to work with.

One more thing is that the movie tries a little too hard to bring out a message. And my guess is that the message is something like: “when it comes down to greed and surviving… there will be no difference between a Nazi or anyone else” or “as long as we have the same enemy we will work together, but afterwards it will only take us a split second to find ourselfes new ones or even turn against former allies”.

Some might argue that a roughly 8 million dollar budget is a lot of money. But looking at the visual quality this movie has, it’s quite a remarkable job. The battle scenes in space look great. A lot of CG work in general. And all of it looks pretty neat! They also work with a ton of greenscreen sets. And yes, you can see it. Nonetheless it’s important to say that it really works in the context of the production. Much like a 60mil dollar ‘Sky captain and the world of tomorrow’ from 2004. It’s crazy how far CG production came in these 8 years. Will be interesting to see what other people might come up with. Now that the possibilities are there and easier to handle.

So my final verdict is that I tend to say that it is a legitimate good movie. You can see that the production really put some heart, sweat and effort into it all. And that is what divides a good b-movie from a bad one. All the missing elements of a big budget movie, that a b-movie obviously has, can be filled with heart and effort. And that is what you can see in this film. Yes it is clunky and cheesy… but hey it’s also a lot of fun. And that’s what the producers want you to have. Plain fun.

And maybe, only a little tiny maybe, it brings people to educate themselfes a little more about the real third reich.

7.5/10

Iron Sky on IMDb

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